Archive (Page 4 of 6)

Personal Privacy Assistants in the Age of the Internet of Things

Imagine your privacy assistant is a computer program that’s running on your smartphone or your smartwatch. Your privacy assistant listens for privacy policies that are being broadcast over a digital stream. We are building standard formats for these privacy policies so that all sensors will speak the same language that your personal privacy assistant will be able to understand.

The Internet of Damned Things

We have to be aware that when you create magic or occult things, when they go wrong they become horror. Because we create technologies to soothe our cultural and social anxieties, in a way. We create these things because we’re worried about security, we’re worried about climate change, we’re worried about threat of terrorism. Whatever it is. And these devices provide a kind of stopgap for helping us feel safe or protected or whatever.

Data & Society Databite #41: Ifeoma Ajunwa on Genetic Coercion

The mythology of genetic coercion is thoughts that genetic data, especially large-scale genetic databases, have the ability to pinpoint certain risk of disease. They provide agency to act to prevent such disease, and it can be used to create accurate personalized treatment for disease, and it should also be entrusted with the authority to dictate the modification of the genome for future generations.

Sin in the Time of Technology

Social media companies have an unparalleled amount of influence over our modern communications. […] These companies also play a huge role in shaping our global outlook on morality and what constitutes it. So the ways in which we perceive different imagery, different speech, is being increasingly defined by the regulations that these platforms put upon us [in] our daily activities on them.

When Algorithms Fail in Our Personal Lives

I wonder with all these varying levels of needs that we have as users, and as we live more and more of our lives digitally and on social media, what would it look like to design a semi-private space in a public network?

No, Thank You: Agency, Imagination, and Possibilities for Rejecting World-Changing Tech

We’re trying to say it’s on you, it’s your responsibility, figure this out, download this, understand end-to-end encryption, when it’s a shared problem and it’s a communal problem.

Ask a Prison Librarian about Privacy, Technology, and State Control

What does it mean to be private when you’re in a place where you have no right to privacy but are ironically deprived of the thing that makes your privacy go away?

If You Build It, They Won’t Care: Designing Privacy-Preserving Technologies for People with Other Interests

I think that privacy is something that we can think of in terms of a civil right, as individuals. […] That’s a civil rights issue. But I think there’s also a way to think about it in terms of a social issue that’s larger than simply the individual.

Human Rights Meets Design Challenges

How do we take this right that you have to your data and put it back in your hands, and give you control over it? And how do we do this not just from a technological perspective but how do we do it from a human perspective?

Digital Privacy IRL

As we’re giving our homes this new layer of smartness and intelligence, we’re giving away its ownership to very large organizations. And as we become a generation of renters, what I’m very interested in is how do landlords respond to that?